Not to touch the earth
by irnan
Summary: Collection of Samcentric drabbley one shots
1. 10 things Sam hates about Dean

_I do NOT own either of the boys, or their Dad, or the Impala… look… I really think you should see someone about that obsession._

_AN: Well, I wrote a list for Dean...and then Sam told me that he felt I'd treated him very unfairly, and that he wanted a chance to tell his side of the story. So I let him. _

_And because she needlessly and remorselessly worried the heck out of me today - this one's for my sister, too. _

**10 Things Sam hates about Dean**

1. The food he eats. If we're going to dignify all that grease by calling it "food".

2. His music. He's had two close calls with them that Sam would give anything to forget, but he can still listen to Blue Oyster Cult's _"Don't Fear the Reaper"_?

3. His utterly inappropriate sense of humour. Reminding that frat boy that some alien made him its bitch! Sam sometimes wonders if Dean actually liked the Trickster.

4. His uncountable and indiscriminate… amorous encounters. It's not a crime to actually feel something for a girl, Dean!

5. That pretense he puts on that he's not as smart as he really is. When Sam first got back from Stanford, Dean had no problem helping with the research. These days he acts like he can't even spell the word.

6. His unquestioning acceptance of Dad's orders. Dean Winchester, hunter, thief, card sharp and Casanova, with the ultimate I-couldn't-give-a-damn-what-you-think-about-me attitude, obeying someone else's every word as if it were God's law?

7. His smart-ass façade. They both know it doesn't fool Sam in the slightest, so why does he still do it?

8. The way he fits in everywhere he goes. He's like a chameleon, always changing. Sam spent four years at Stanford and he still couldn't manage it.

9. His cynicism. Why can't he believe that there's good in the world as well as evil? Why can't he see that when his whole life, hell his very existence, is proof of it?

10. His selflessness. Sam knows he'll never be able to make Dean see that it's OK to be selfish sometimes, that Dean deserves to want and have some things for _himself_. But that won't stop him trying.


	2. Senses

**Taste**

Of course, he was far too young at six months to ever remember, but demon's blood tastes bitter, almost lemony, and unlike human blood its usually cold as ice water. But as it slipped down his throat, as he swallowed convulsively, it _burned_.

**

* * *

Touch**

The feel of the Impala's steering wheel under your hands is more exciting than it should be: it's only a car, Sam! You've driven it before.

True. But not like this. Because Dean's not hovering, not sporting an exaggeratedly nervous look, not trying to watch both you and the road like a hawk at the same time. No, he's slumped in the passenger seat, eyes closed, one hand under his jacket on his bandages, and he's trusting you with his baby.

It only lasts a year, but still.

**

* * *

Sight**

You'd never meant not to talk to him. You'd never meant to lose contact with him. But you were so _angry,_ and a part of you always worried that if you called Dean Dad'd pick up. You were so damn proud, and so damn afraid.

It tore at you, when you let it.

So the sight of his face looking down at you in the dim light of your darkened living room is both the most surprising and the most welcome one you've ever seen.

**

* * *

Hearing**

The silence in the motel room is broken only by Dean's steady breathing, and Sam's thoughts, so loud in his head he's surprised they don't wake Dean up. Why is it that arguments with the people we love get so quickly out of control, words we don't mean jumping out of our mouths before we can stop them?

Because they are the people we love. Only they can hurt us so terribly, and so, feeling betrayed, we lash out at them, hurting them the way they've hurt us, because we just don't know what else to do.

The phone rings, interrupting Sam's wretched, guilt-racked musings.

_"__Sammy, that you?__"_

**

* * *

Smell**

Sam didn't know how, but their bed always smelled of vanilla. It was Jess' favourite scent. After she'd showered it would fill the bathroom, and it always clung to the sheets. He suspected she arranged that deliberately, but how was beyond him.

The last thing he did before opening his eyes that night was take a deep, long breath of that scent.


	3. beer and broken noses

**Beer and broken noses**

"I think I'm speechless," John Winchester announced to the kitchen at large.

Sam didn't say anything. There wasn't much he could answer to that. Dad was never speechless. Especially in situations like these.

"I mean, Dean, sure, if it had been Dean... but you?"

"Dad, I..."

"The principal told me –"

"The principal's an idiot," Dean cut in hoarsely. He was sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped in blankets, sniffing suspiciously at the cough mixture Dad had just handed him. Taking any kind of medicine was something Dean preferred to avoid at all costs, but he'd had the flu for a week now and Dad had finally put his foot down.

"Of course he's an idiot," John snapped. "Or he wouldn't be doing that job. I've only got two kids and I'm going slowly insane, he's got hundreds."

That wasn't fair, Sam thought.

"Dad, come on! It's not like I'm going to gaol, or anything, it wasn't that bad!"

"You broke this kid's –"

"David Lewis," Dean supplied helpfully.

"You _broke_ this kid's _nose!"_

"He's a bully," Sam said sharply. "He punches people about as often as others shake hands, and he harasses the girls. Last week he set fire to Max Evans' book bag. He's responsible for almost all the vandalism on the school grounds. Even a few of the teachers are afraid of him. So when he decided I was this week's victim of choice…"

"_Yes_, Sammy, I _know_ all that, but did you have to do it in front of the staff room windows?"

Dean's rasping laughter sounded kinda grotesque, like something straight out of _The Addams Family._

Sam huffed. That had been something of a mistake. Still, at least he'd saved his own book bag from death by fire.

John sighed helplessly, pulled two beers out of the fridge, and sat down at the table with the boys. Dean reached for the second bottle, but John slid it across to Sam, whose jaw dropped.

"If you're old enough to drive _and_ break peoples noses…" his Dad said, mouth twitching.

"What about me?" Dean demanded.

John glared pointedly at the cough mixture.

Sam took a long swallow of his first officially sanctioned beer and grinned at the sight of a blanket-wrapped Dean fiddling around with teaspoons and cough medicine.


	4. wednesday morning, 3 am

_AN: Title from the Simon and Garfunkel song._

**Wednesday morning, 3 a.m.**

The motel room was dark and silent but for the sound of Dean's slow, steady breathing. Sam lay on his back staring up at the ceiling, waiting for the centuries-old digital clock on the bedside table to finally show the magic number: 3:00 a.m.

He'd missed it so many times – too many. First while at Stanford, and then, once back on the road, he'd been too consumed with his grief for Jess, his battle with his supposed destiny. But since Cold Oak, and Dean's stupid ridiculous deal, he was determined not to miss it again. It was too precious for that.

The tradition had started when Sam had been six, crawling into Dean's bed one night after a nightmare. He'd done it again at seven, thinking waking Dean up at 3 a.m. would be the surest way to annoy him, and by the time he'd been ten, the routine was firmly established.

Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

Sam slipped silently out of his own bed and sat on the edge of Dean's, taking care not to wake his hyper-aware, always-ready-for-anything older brother.

Then he poked him in the ribs.

Dean shot up with a hiss of surprise, reaching for the knife under his pillow, and then let out a sigh of exasperation, realising what was going on.

"Must you?" he demanded.

"Every year, dude," Sam said, unnaturally cheerful. Well, he had every reason to be, didn't he?

"It's a stupid tradition," Dean grumbled.

Sam shrugged. "I don't care. It's my tradition."

It might have been dark, but he could feel the scorching heat of Dean's glare.

"Happy thirtieth, Dean," Sam told him, smirking.

"Go back to sleep, Sammy," Dean said, trying to sound irritated.


	5. all that's best of dark and bright

**All that's best of dark and bright**

Sometimes you feel like there are two of you, two different people sharing the same body.

There's _you_, Sam Winchester, who's a twenty-two year-old Stanford University student. You study hard, get good grades, spend your week-ends with your friends, of whom you have many, or working. You share a scruffy, messy, book-filled apartment that smells of paint at every hour of the day with the girl you love more than anything in the world, and who loves you back the same way. Jess is golden-haired and has eyes the colour of the summer sky. She's one of those rare people who have an inexhaustible supply of patience and kindness and love… until you prove to her that you don't deserve it.

Then, she can be pretty mean. Her tongue's sharper than a guillotine, some days, towards some people. She might paint like an angel, but she has an unfortunate habit of laziness that's only conquered by impending deadlines and sheer enthusiasm for the subject of the deadline. She hates deception and underhandedness, but when you told her that there were some things about you you'd rather keep to yourself and no amount of fighting is going to change that, she _smiled_.

"That's all you ever had to say," she said, and you realise that while she hates being actively lied to, she does understand simply not wanting to talk about things.

Her birthday is on the twenty-fourth of January. It's one of the only days of the year when the other Sam Winchester stirs, somewhere in the recesses of your shared mind, and feebly struggles against the darkness you keep him locked in.

This Sam Winchester used to be the only one there was, until the man you are now started to emerge from boyish dreams and confused longings, much as he is trying to emerge from your own jumbled memories and occasional fitful nightmares.

This Sam Winchester scopes buildings out when he first enters them and knows the exact position of the back door to every diner he eats in. This Sam Winchester can shoot straight with any weapon you'd care to offer him, shotgun or rifle or .45. This Sam Winchester can use a knife with equal facility, although he's not quite as fast as Dean. This Sam Winchester can stitch wounds and track people through the woods. This Sam Winchester can hustle pool, and become anyone he can imagine simply by putting on a different attitude before he leaves the house in the morning.

This Sam Winchester emerges, slowly but inevitably, that Halloween when someone breaks into your apartment. He gives a soundless whoop of delight when he realises its Dean who's just pinned him to the floor for the first time in four years, and you struggle fiercely to stay in control, make disparaging remarks about Dad, try and convince him that the old man's just gotten lost on the way back from a hunt.

But this Sam Winchester is the one who loves, more than anything in the world, not Jess, but Dean, and so you know when he says _All right,__ I'll come with you, _that no matter whether or not you make it back to the interview on Monday morning, you've lost.


	6. comes down to you

**Comes down to you**

"All right," Sam says, sitting down opposite his brother in yet another seedy bar, "I gotta know."

Dean can't help the grin. "Dude. Didn't I make you have this conversation with Dad when you were, like, _eleven_?"

Sam flicks beer foam at him. "Remember when I first got back from Stanford?" he asks, and Dean stops wiping foam off his jacket sleeve to frown – not so much at the question itself as the way Sammy put it. Not _after Jess died_, or _when Dad disappeared_, or even _after you came to get me_, but _when I got back from Stanford_.

Like it had been an exchange year, or something.

"Yeah," Dean says, making light of it as usual. "I got dragged off by a Wendigo, and then you performed an exorcism on a crashing plane."

Sam's mouth curves. "You also used to do research," he points out.

"Not me, man. Can't even spell it. Anyway, I spent all morning in the library!"

How he reconciles those two statements is anybody's guess.

"And then spent the afternoon in the assistant librarian's bed," Sam retaliates. Dean pulls out that dreamy, far-away look he practically invented just to annoy his brother. "Yeeeeaaaah… So?"

The grin he delivers after is worse, though.

"Point is," Sam says, staying on topic with some difficulty in face of Dean's obvious desire to take the conversation in some other direction (he's checking out the barmaid, for cryin' out loud!) "Point is – when did that change?"

"When did what change?" Very few people are as good at deliberately obtuse as Dean is.

"The research!" Sam's getting exasperated. "You can do it, I know that. You did it when we were kids, you _had_ to do it when I was at Stanford. I know you're not as dumb as you like to pretend; you're way more intuitive than I am, so why d'you never bother?"

Dean frowns at him. "Do I have to?" he asks.

Sam sits gaping for a moment or two while his older brother watches him quizzically.

"Oh," he says at last.

Now Dean just looks amused.

"Duh," he says. "You want another beer?"

"Please," Sam says automatically, already hauling his laptop out again.


	7. eyes that shine, burning red

_AN: "Sin City" aired over here on Sunday, and this is what my head made of the last scene._

_Title from Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog"_

**

* * *

Eyes that shine, burning red**

He doesn't remember how it started. It was too long ago for that.

He thinks. In truth, it could have been yesterday. Or a thousand years ago. It's not like time has any meaning for him anymore.

In the face of eternity, time means nothing.

_She_ is still with him, though. He asked her _why_ once, and she just shrugged, and smiled, and kissed him. Sometimes he thinks she loves him, as best she can, being what she is.

He knows he doesn't love her. Even when still human, he didn't.

In the face of eternity, blood-red days and darkest nights run together, blur into each other, become one.

In the face of eternity, why bother remembering them?

Eternity. That's how long he has to wait.

She laughed when she told him that. Sometimes he thinks he should have killed her then.

But he's patient. He's always been patient. Always known how to do nothing, just sit and wait and let what was coming, come.

Eternity is a long, long time, true. But he can wait. He can put up with her for that long.

Then, when it happens, when the day comes, he'll rest the muzzle of the Colt against her throat, in the hollow where her pulse should beat, like he did so long ago, and he'll pull the trigger, like he should have done so long ago.

When the day comes, and Dean is returned to him.


	8. every new beginning

_AN: Title a line from a song called „Closing Time__" by __Semisonic. __It got played__ at my graduation, so it __kinda__ stuck with me even though I've never heard of the band before or since ;)_

**

* * *

Every new beginning**

"Thank God for that," Jess said, stepping back from the container and making a show of dusting her hands off. "When we get home, there will actually be room in the wardrobe."

"You hope," said Sam, coming up behind her with his own bin-liner full of old clothes.

"I know," Jess said firmly. "It's amazing, really. We're only twenty-one, but somehow we've managed to collect all this stuff."

"One bag of old clothes for the recycling each doesn't really count as 'all this stuff'," her boyfriend teased as he swung the bag in question up onto the tray. Then he stepped back and took hold of the lever to tip the tray up and thereby let the bag fall into the container.

"There should be a drum-roll," Jess said. "I mean, we're throwing our teenage years away for good, never to be seen again!"

Sam laughed, but she was right, really. Those jeans at the top there, he'd been wearing those on the last hunt he'd ever been on: a spirit in South Carolina. And the t-shirt underneath them, Dad had once used to carry a cursed necklace, and somewhere in there was the jacket Sam had been wearing the first time he'd been injured on a hunt – a poltergeist had broken two of his ribs.

He yanked the lever up. The tray tipped, the bag fell, and from inside the container came a hollow-sounding boom that reverberated around the car-park and through Sam's very life, like a heavy door being crashed shut.

"Now, back to _our _apartment," Jess said with happy emphasis on the pronoun.

Two days later, she found a ratty old AC/DC shirt on Sam's side of their new wardrobe.

"It's Dean's," he said when she held it out to him by her fingertips (and at arm's length), eyebrows tilted accusingly. "Came along by mistake when I… when I left."

Jess carried on glaring.

Sam leaned over the couch and firmly took it off her before she decided to sprint for the kitchen, and the bin.

"I'll give it back to him someday," he promised.


	9. don't look back in anger

**Don't look back in anger**

It's not that he regrets killing them. Not for a minute. They had Dean by the throat, literally, and he could never regret saving his brother's life.

Remorse? Maybe that's a better word. He's not sure.

It's just that, for the first time in two years, he understands what Dean meant, in that cabin, before… before the crash.

_For you, or Dad, the things I'm __willin__' to do, or kill, it scares me, man._

But Dean has never let that stop him. Not once. Not even when he was killing himself.

So neither will Sam.


	10. with the lights out it's less dangerous

**With the lights out it's less dangerous**

"It's hard to say, Mr. Winchester," the Principal said. "No one was hurt, thankfully, but the damage does look pretty bad. Of course, we can't hold your son entirely responsible-" the tone of his voice suggested he rather regretted that "- but he will be suspended for a week or so."

John grimaced. That sort of thing would probably go on the boy's permanent record.

On the other hand, he kinda deserved it. This kind of situation was what they'd had in mind when they'd invented words like 'debacle' or 'fiasco'. Breaking into the school after hours with a bunch of friends was one thing. Putting up a gallows in front of the Principal's office, maybe a little worse, but still essentially harmless.

And of course it was true that he wasn't responsible for his friends accidently setting the bike sheds on fire on the way out of a second-storey window, but considering the fact that he was, after all, a Winchester, John felt he was justified in thinking the boy should have been paying better attention to what the little idiots were up to. Letting that stoner kid get up on the roof and start singing like that!

He pushed open the door to the classroom his sons were waiting in, and glared at the culprit.

"Any defense to make, or do I send you straight to the firing squad?"

"Dean bet me twenty bucks I wouldn't do it," Sam said sulkily, as if his big brother had forced him into accepting the bet.

"You weren't supposed to take me seriously!" Dean yelled indignantly.

John tucked his hands into the pockets of his jeans and tried very very hard not to laugh.


	11. times have come

_**AN:** Yes, this IS about Sam. Read and see. In my head, it's also part of the pathways verse, but that doesn't show (at all) much._

**Times have come**

One of the things Mary Winchester loved best about her house right now was the basement. Enormous, old, dimly lit, and above all cool, the perfect place to hide from the crushing Kansas heat. Dean was off treasure-hunting in a corner, crawling around on hands and knees and whispering conspiratorially to King Arthur. His mother had carried a pile of cushions and blankets downstairs with them and was lying comfortably in the light, reading a book, when John came down the stairs, barefoot and running his hands through damp hair.

"Need a haircut," he said, joining his wife on the floor. "And it's too hot to breathe upstairs, let alone outside in the sun."

"Wish you wouldn't. I like it long."

"It's awkward for work," he said. "What're you reading?"

"Lovecraft. I don't suppose you know what 'batrachian' means?"

"Something to do with frogs." John said, stretching out next to her. "Y'know, we made a mistake fixing this place up. Shoulda had the bedroom down here. Outta the heat and safe from tornadoes."

"But freezing in winter," Mary pointed out. "Besides, there's Dean."

"Could still put a wall in," John mused, propping himself up on his elbows. "Right over there, maybe..."

Mary put her book down and slung a leg over his, pushed him back down and settled in, head on his shoulder, arm lying limply across his chest. Her dress had ridden up her thigh a ways, and John traced loose loving patterns over her skin, so much paler than his own. She gave a contented little sigh, warm breath caressing his collarbone. Peace creeping over him. She smelled like that orangy-lemony shampoo she used, an island of clean and fresh in the damp-concrete washing machine smell of the basement. He let his head fall back a little, and she pressed her nose into the hollow below his throat, breathing him in in turn.

John was on the verge of dozing off like that when a loud crash shattered the mood, Dean's peeved voice rising above it in a word he'd undoubtably picked up from his mother.

"Dean, are you OK?" Mary called, sitting up, ready to go rescue him.

"M'OK, Mommy," Dean called back. "King Arthur walked into the booby-trap round the treasure." He sounded more sulky than hurt. John could just make him out in the gloom under the stairs, a blur of blond and paleness like his mother. There was another brief clatter, and then a couple cans rolled out of the corner towards John and Mary.

"There goes my beer," he said dryly.

"Just remember in the years to come that you were the one who thought he needed a little brother," Mary said.

John stared at her. "That a yes?"

She bit her lip, smiling a little. "Pills ran out yesterday, and I really can't be bothered to go get another prescription. It's always such a fuss."

John sat up and kissed her.


End file.
